Setting up your own Lifesteal SMP server: plugins, heart rules and PvP

Ask a group of young Minecraft players what kind of server they want, and chances are the answer is Lifesteal. Over the past few years the format has grown into the fastest-growing SMP variant, helped by mega-servers like DonutSMP and the PvP videos of creators like ClownPierce. The idea is simple, the tension is huge, and that's exactly why it works so well on your own server with friends or a starting community. In this guide you'll read what Lifesteal actually is, whether to use a plugin or a datapack, which rules keep the format fun and how to deal with its less pleasant side: griefing and toxic behaviour.

What exactly is Lifesteal?

On a Lifesteal server your health bar is literally at stake. Kill another player and you steal a heart: your maximum health goes up permanently, your victim's goes down. Die yourself and you hand in a heart. And whoever hits zero hearts is out: the infamous heartban. Depending on the server rules that means a temporary ban, spectator mode or waiting until a fellow player brings you back with a revive item.

That one change transforms the entire game. On a regular SMP, dying is a minor inconvenience; on Lifesteal every death hurts and every kill counts double. Players build their base like a fortress, form alliances, betray those alliances again and remember exactly who stole their hearts. That's the charm, but be honest with your player group: anyone who mainly wants to build and gather in peace is better off on a classic SMP.

Plugin or datapack?

Lifesteal comes in two flavours. A datapack goes into the world/datapacks folder of a regular vanilla server and works without extra server software. A plugin runs on server software such as Paper and gives you far more knobs to turn.

For a handful of friends who don't want to tinker with the server any further, a datapack is fine. For anything beyond that you want a plugin, and our recommendation is LifeStealZ: free, actively maintained and built precisely for this format. Players start with ten hearts by default and can grow to twenty, you decide how many hearts a kill earns and what a natural death costs, and it includes craftable hearts and a revive item that lets eliminated players be brought back.

Either way, build your server on Paper: it's the standard for plugin servers, performs considerably better than vanilla and virtually every plugin you'll come across later in this guide runs on it.

The rules that keep Lifesteal fun

The difference between a Lifesteal server that runs for months and one that empties out after two weeks almost always comes down to the rules. Four things to decide up front:

• Heartban duration. Permanent elimination sounds exciting, but that way you lose players for good every single week. A temporary ban of, say, 24 or 48 hours keeps the tension alive without draining your community. Save permanent elimination for special hardcore seasons.
• Revive mechanic. Make a revive item craftable, but make it expensive, with a recipe full of rare materials. That turns bringing back a friend into a joint project instead of a formality, and still gives a heartban a way out.
• Countering combat logging. Logging out the moment you're losing a fight is THE annoyance on every PvP server. A plugin like CombatLogX solves it: anyone who logs out mid-fight dies or leaves behind an NPC that can still be taken down.
• Anti-cheat. Wherever hearts can be won, cheaters show up. GrimAC is free and open source and catches the most common combat cheats. Don't expect miracles: no anti-cheat catches everything, so active moderators remain necessary.

PvP settings and spawn protection

PvP is obviously enabled on a Lifesteal server, but not everywhere. Use WorldGuard to create a protected area around spawn where fighting and building are off limits, so new players can look around without losing a heart within ten seconds. Keep that zone small, though: a big safe zone becomes a hiding spot players linger in endlessly.

Also watch how it combines with your combat plugin: a player in the middle of a fight shouldn't be able to run into a safe zone anyway. And turn keepInventory off, because losing your gear is part of the format's tension. If you'd rather have no PvP at all in a particular world, our knowledge base explains how to turn PvP off.

Honestly: this format attracts trouble

This is the part many guides skip. Lifesteal rewards killing, and that attracts a young and fanatical audience. Expect spawn killers, base griefers, slanging matches in chat and players coming back on a second account to dodge their heartban. That's no reason not to start, but it is a reason to be prepared:

• Run CoreProtect alongside everything, so you can roll back griefing with a few commands instead of repairing by hand.
• Write rules that are concrete: is base raiding allowed? Building traps at spawn? Hunting one new player as a group of five? The clearer the rules, the less arguing afterwards.
• Use a chat filter and don't be afraid of short mutes; on a server with lots of young players a chat argument escalates quickly.
• Consider a whitelist via your Discord server: it raises a barrier against alt accounts dodging a heartban, and instantly gives you a place for reports and announcements.

Realistically, count on a few hours of moderation per week. A Lifesteal server without active staff turns into exactly the toxic mess the format is sometimes known for within a month.

Which server do you need?

Luckily, Lifesteal isn't heavy: Paper with a handful of plugins such as LifeStealZ, CombatLogX, WorldGuard, GrimAC and CoreProtect runs fine on a modest package. For a group of friends 4 GB of RAM is a good starting point; if your community grows, you simply scale up. At MC-Node a Minecraft server starts from €0,50 per month and you pay roughly €1,10 per GB of RAM, so experimenting costs little. Everything runs on our own hardware with NVMe storage in the Previder data centre in Hengelo, with DDoS protection included; no unnecessary luxury, because busy PvP servers are a popular target. And since everything can be cancelled monthly, you can try the format with your friend group for a month before turning it into something bigger.

Further reading

• The 9 best Minecraft plugins in 2026
• Paper or Purpur for your Minecraft server?
• Securing your Minecraft server: whitelist, permissions and DDoS
• Minecraft Realms or your own server: when do you outgrow Realms?
• Minecraft server at home vs renting: the honest trade-off